Untitled

Luis Caballero was a key figure in the revival of expressive drawing in Latin America from the 1960s through the 1980s. In part as a rejection of the grandeur and pomposity of the Mexican Muralist movement, many artists in those years reclaimed the traditional medium of drawing to explore some of the more personal and psychologically charged aspects of art. Caballero’s subject was always the human figure, particularly the male nude, which he has rendered here with virtuoso boldness in charcoal. This work is typical in that it does not show the model’s face, but rather concentrates on the physical expression and tension contained in the figure’s musculature. Caballero was not interested in laying out a narrative in his work, but rather used drawing to suggest a physical and emotional state. His modeling reflects his early interest in Michelangelo’s loose drawing style. Working from his own identity as a gay man, Caballero evoked the beauty and eroticism of the male nude in his drawings, but also the social anonymity of homosexuality in a repressed society like Colombia’s.